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4: The Politics of Exile

THE PERIOD of the Japanese occupation sent many Koreans away from their homeland. Gradually there came to be three major centers of Korean exiles: the Maritime Province of the U.S.S.R., northern China, and the United States. All three, together with Korea itself, were centers of independence activities. The importance of the expatriate groups is measured by the fact that after liberation both north and south Korea would be largely ruled by erstwhile expatriates.

Within the United States and its territories, no place was more a hotbed of exile activity than Hawaii. Many Asian immigrants to America had gotten no further than Hawaii; there were Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, some of whom had run out of money in Hawaii, others of whom had been won over by the attractions of living among their fellow nationals in the islands. If the Korean community in Hawaii was not the largest in size, it nonetheless reflected more than any other group the turbulence in its homeland.

Politically conscious Koreans have historically found difficulty in working harmoniously together. Indeed, when Syngman Rhee was beginning his revolutionary career in the Independence Club he had refused a request by Philip Jaisohn to suspend publication of the Maiyil Sinmun lest it compete with the club organ Independence. A tendency towards factionalism long prevalent in Korean politics was nowhere more in evidence than among exiles in Hawaii, who brought old feuds with them from Korea and developed new ones in the islands. By 1913, the Korean community there was already marked by divisions based on family ties, personal animosities, and provincial origins.

Rhee arrived in Hawaii full of plans for stimulating nationalism among the Koreans there. His post as principal of a Korean-language school, however, brought him into conflict with Methodist authorities over the issue of segregated schools. Although church officials opposed separate schools for different nationalities, Rhee fought for segregation as a means of propagating Korean nationalism. Opposition from church leaders prompted Rhee to break with the Methodists in 1916 and set up his own institution, the Christian Institute, along the lines he had advocated.

Rhee’s differences with church authorities were not confined to the educational field. Once having broken with the Methodists, he set up a rival church as he had set up a school, establishing the former as a non-denominational institution dedicated to Korean independence. By striking out on his own when unable to win over his opponents, Rhee became known for his intolerance and impetuousness. His admiring biographer concedes that Rhee’s twenty-five years in Hawaii “were marked by disputation.”¹ But by setting up his own institutions Rhee was able to build up a strong personal following, some of which would follow him back to Korea in 1945.

The Mansei uprising and the subsequent formation of the Provisional Government prompted Rhee to journey to Washington in the spring of 1919. Just as he had been prevented from pleading Korea’s case at Versailles, so was he unable to gain American recognition of the Provisional Government. While in Washington, however, he established a “shadow” Korean legation, the Korean Commission, which was to lobby on behalf of the Provisional Government and Rhee for the next three decades.

The establishment of a government-in-exile, however poor its prospects, served to acerbate differences among independence leaders scattered abroad. In Hawaii, Rhee quarreled with Ahn Chang-ho, head of the well-established Korean National Association and father of the Western-oriented Young Korea Academy. Ahn, like Rhee a Christian and an erstwhile member of the Independence Club, was less interested in immediate political action than in stressing moral values to the Korean people, propagating Korean culture, and introducing Western methods into his homeland. Ahn and his followers, unlike Rhee, were willing to work under the Japanese, and were able to establish schools which served as forums for their teachings and as cover for other independence activities.

If Rhee’s relations with his colleagues in Hawaii were less than harmonious, his dealings with the Provisional Government in Shanghai became equally strained. The Provisional Government reflected the fiery leadership of Kim Koo, who sought means of harassing the Japanese militarily and had little respect for Rhee’s diplomatic representations. Other elements of the government-in-exile were Communist-inclined and, though distrusted by both Kim and Rhee, pressed vigorously for military cooperation with the Chinese Communists. The Kuomintang’s break with the Communists in 1924 hastened the splintering of the Provisional Government into rightist and leftist groups.

Although the exile government remained a predominantly rightist organization, Rhee had no more sympathy with Kim’s militant views than with Ahn Chang-ho’s program of internal reforms. Rhee’s relations with Ahn were further aggravated when Kim Kyu-sic, a leading member of the Young Korea Academy, began to press for the admission of leftists into the Provisional Government. Although his own diplomatic overtures had proven unproductive, Rhee was totally unsympathetic with any approach except his own. Despite Kim Koo’s efforts, military activity against the Japanese came to be the province of leftist Koreans.

The Mansei uprising was a purely nationalistic demonstration against Japanese colonialism. Despite Communist propaganda to the contrary, it was neither a proletarian uprising nor one inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. There was nothing proletarian about the signers of the March declaration, who were largely teachers, Christian pastors, and professional men. They had little knowledge of events in Russia, where in any case the success of the Bolsheviks was not yet assured.

By 1920, however, Communist philosophy was winning Korean adherents in the U.S.S.R. and Manchuria. During the Russian Revolution the large concentration of Koreans around Vladivostok had supported Kerensky’s provisional government, but after the war the Soviets succeeded in winning over many young Koreans and new immigrants. Although they understood little of the Marxist dialectic, young Koreans who were sufficiently anti-Japanese to have left their homeland were immediately attracted by the Soviets’ anti-imperialist professions. These Russian-oriented Koreans would form the nucleus of Communist government in North Korea after World War II.

Gradually, despite harsh Japanese countermeasures, the first Communist cells worked their way into Korea itself. Although the movement appears to have had little direction from Moscow, it found supporters among intellectuals disillusioned with the failure of the peaceful Mansei uprising. In addition, it enjoyed a measure of prestige as a result of the gradual stabilization of the Soviet government. Unity and direction, however, were badly lacking; the factionalism which characterized Korean political activity elsewhere was no worse than that among the Communists. Japanese suppression was severe; large-scale arrests in 1925 and 1926 deprived the party of top leaders such as Pak Hun-young and Choi Chang-ik. Only two years after recognizing the Korean Communist Party the Comintern lamented:

“The ranks of the Communist Party in Korea have in the past consisted almost exclusively of intellectuals and students. A Communist Party built on such foundations cannot be a consistently bolshevik and organizationally sound Party. The first task of the communist movement of Korea is therefore to strengthen its own ranks. . . . The petty-bourgeois intellectual composition of the Party, and the lack of contact with the workers, have hitherto constituted one of the main causes of the permanent crisis in the communist movement of Korea. The frequent failures of the Korean communists show that the Party was unable to organize its conspiratorial work properly.”²

5. Syngman Rhee (second row, seventh from left) pictured with members of the Shanghai Provisional Government at a New Year celebration in 1922. This documentary photograph carries black arrows indicating Rhee and Kim Koo (front row, third from left), the latter of whom was killed in 1949 by a Korean Army lieutenant, reportedly a member of Kim’s own Korean Independence Party. (Pacific Stars and Stripes Photo)

Korea’s domestic Communists were so nationalistic in outlook that Moscow may never have reposed much confidence in them. But for Korea, unlike China, the Soviets were able to develop leadership from among Russian-raised nationalists who in time would make North Korea the most responsive and submissive of Soviet satellites.

Also susceptible to Communist indoctrination were Koreans who had migrated to China and Manchuria. But these areas became a haven for Koreans of all extremes, whether right or left, and the facts of geography made them less susceptible to Soviet influence than to Chinese. China-oriented Koreans were particularly successful in harassing the Japanese during the 1930’s. A Japanese account described how these operations were carried out:

“Korean outlaws formed themselves into a band, four hundred strong, and, aided by Chinese bandits and Russian Bolsheviks, attacked Hunchun in September and October, 1920, during which months they set fire to and destroyed the Japanese consulate and some Japanese houses, looted valuable articles, and killed many Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese, including women and children. At the same time, refractory Koreans in North Chientao began to move, menacing the safety of Japanese and law-abiding Koreans there. Under the circumstances, the government dispatched a military expedition. . . . After a campaign of a few weeks the expedition succeeded in supressing the Korean outlaws. About five thousand of them surrendered.”³

Even though the account is distorted, it is obvious that Korean guerrillas were a major source of annoyance to the Japanese. Their successes increased the influence of leftists within the Provisional Government, and prompted some defections. A Korean Revolutionary Party, led by Kim Won-bong, drew some leftists from the Provisional Government.

The Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 brought renewed activity on the part of the government-in-exile. The Provisional Government was reorganized with Kim Koo as president, while Rhee was sent to Geneva to plead Korea’s case there. In April 1932, a Korean nationalist hurled a bomb in Shanghai which killed General Shirakawa, commander of the Japanese armies in China, and wounded Mamoru Shigemitsu, later foreign minister, and Admiral Nomura, Japan’s ambassador in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor. Among those arrested in the wake of the assassination was Ahn Chang-ho, and tortures suffered while in prison hastened his death in 1938.

In Geneva, Rhee was unsuccessful in his attempts to present Korea’s case before the League of Nations. His failure prompted him to try a new tactic: encouraged by the Chinese ambassador to Switzerland, Rhee applied for a visa to Moscow. With Japanese expansion posing a threat to the Soviet Union as well as to China, he hoped for a more friendly reception than he had found in the West. The Soviets, however, had so adequate a foothold among Koreans in the U.S.S.R. and Manchuria that they felt no compunction to aid that exile faction least amenable to Soviet control. In any case, the U.S.S.R. was by then more concerned with Nazi Germany than with imperial Japan.

Rhee’s visit to Moscow was not unlike his unsuccessful representations elsewhere, except that it showed him willing to solicit even Communist aid on behalf of the Provisional Government. His visit to Switzerland was a turning point in his personal life, however, for there he met Francesca Donner, whom he married the following year. Rhee returned to the United States to make arrangements for Miss Donner to enter the country. He was fifty-nine and she thirty-six when they were married on October 8, 1933. It would be the lot of Francesca Rhee, the daughter of an Austrian nobleman, to become the first lady of an Asian nation which she had never seen.

The following year was largely taken up with a speaking tour of the United States. Rhee had become increasingly isolated from the Provisional Government, as a result of personality clashes, geographic separation, and the fact that the Provisional Government had its hands full with internal troubles. In 1936, however, a number of hitherto rival factions in China merged into a conservative Korean National Front with its headquarters in Hangchow, thus maintaining a semblance of unity under rightist leadership.

In 1939, with friction among Koreans in Hawaii making his church and school endeavors increasingly difficult, Rhee moved to Washington. There he took advantage of the growing popular concern over Japan to publish his own indictment of the Japanese, Japan Inside Out. As was to be expected, the book was a long resume of Japanese encroachments in Korea. But in addition it contained early symptoms that Rhee had come to view himself as a Korean Moses. His description of the abortive independence movement of the 1890’s left little doubt as to whom Rhee regarded as its driving force:

“The conservative Korean government, having a childlike faith in [its treaties with foreign powers] opened everything to the Japanese without preparing for national defense. It was in 1895, soon after the close of the Sino-Japanese war, that I came to realize the danger and undertook to inform the nation of the imminent danger to our national existence. I started the first daily newspaper in Korea, through the columns of which I did all I could to cause our people to know what the Japanese and the Russians, the two rival forces, were trying to do. In cooperation with many patriotic leaders, we [sic] succeeded in arousing a sufficient number of people to join with us in inaugurating a national defense program.”⁴

Moreover, for all of Rhee’s studies in international law at Harvard and Princeton, he continued to regard the old treaty of amity between the United States and Korea as a guarantee of American protection:

“If [the Korean emperor’s appeal for U.S. protection against Japan] was really foolish, the Koreans were not alone responsible for it. The United States Senate and the President of the United States, as well as the State Department, all gave their approval and affixed their signatures to the treaty, thus making it a law of the United States. . . . This is, indeed, a blemish on the glorious pages of American history. Korea paid heavily for being a peace-loving nation and putting her trust in the sanctity of international treaties.”⁵

Finally, although Rhee provided some documentation for his charges of a Japanese blueprint for world conquest, he offered only generalities when it came to the question of how to meet the Japanese threat. While denying that he espoused preventive war, Rhee called upon the United States to check Japan “before it is too late.” But how Japan was to be checked in 1939 short of war is never made clear, and when it came to Japan’s exact intentions, Rhee’s crystal ball was no better than that of the average American. “The open Japanese threats of war against the United States are only a bluff,” he wrote. “They know too well that it would be suicidal for them to plunge into war with the United States while Great Britain and China are menacing the Axis lineup from both ends.”⁶

The concept of deterrence through preparedness was fundamental with Rhee, and his later demands as president of South Korea that the Free World unite against communism would only echo his earlier “program” to check Japan. The stalemate in the Korean War further convinced Rhee that if sufficient force could be brought to bear, his enemies would back down or quit.

Rhee’s get-tough policy was suitable for situations in which the vital interests of a major power were clearly threatened. Had it been adopted by England and France in the 1930’s, the rise of Hitler might have been forestalled. But in seeking allies for Korea, Rhee made no allowance for the unwillingness of any power to commit itself outside its areas of interest; indeed, he regarded the United States as having committed a breach of faith in not having protected his homeland against the Japanese. It is ironic that the threat of communism would bring about Rhee’s wildest hope: that the United States become the guarantor of Korean independence.